Definition

The Child Depression Inventory (CDI) is a symptom-oriented instrument for assessing depression in children between the ages of seven and 17 years. The basic CDI consists of 27 items, but a 10-item short form is also available for use as a screener.

Purpose

The CDI was first published by Maria Kovacs in 1992. It was developed because depression in young children is often difficult to diagnose, and also because depression was regarded as an adult disorder until the 1970s. It was thought that children's nervous systems were not sufficiently mature to manifest the neurochemical changes in brain function associated with depression.

In 2002 the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimated that as many...